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The Forge booth was awesome this year (full disclosure: I worked the Indie Press Revolution chunk of it, running sales). The main draw, as ever, is that half of the booth is taken up by demo space with 10-20 minute tasters of all the games on sale run by the game designers, and the booth is hopping all convention long.

Although alone among exhibitors to publish sales results, the idea that the Forge came in third after WW and WotC is alas, conjecture contested by Paizo and probably Palladium - although who knows for sure? What we can say for sure is that year-on-year, the market for creator-owned independently published roleplaying games is growing, and shows no sign of slowing down.

Also, the games were fucking awesome this year - old and new. New titles like Burning Empires, 1001 Nights and Don't Rest Your Head sat deservedly proudly alongside the stalwarts of new gaming like Sorcerer, Dogs in the Vineyard and Breaking the Ice.

- Alexander

The Forge booth was awesome this year (full disclosure: I worked the Indie Press Revolution chunk of it, running sales). The main draw, as ever, is that half of the booth is taken up by demo space with 10-20 minute tasters of all the games on sale run by the game designers, and the booth is hopping all convention long.

Although alone among exhibitors to publish sales results, the idea that the Forge came in third after WW and WotC is alas, conjecture contested by Paizo and probably Palladium - although who knows for sure? What we can say for sure is that year-on-year, the market for creator-owned independently published roleplaying games is growing, and shows no sign of slowing down.

Also, the games were fucking awesome this year - old and new. New titles like Burning Empires, 1001 Nights and Don't Rest Your Head sat deservedly proudly alongside the stalwarts of new gaming like Sorcerer, Dogs in the Vineyard and Breaking the Ice.

- Alexander

• Kill Puppies for Satan: An Unfunny Roleplaying Game. "the system is minimal in the way that particularly irritates people who would rather be playing rolemaster or millenium's end. you have only six stats, for instance, and that's counting generously. one stat is how many people hate you"
• Dogs in the Vineyard. The Lord may be your shepard, but sometimes he can use a gnarly old Watchdog to help keep the wolves at bay.
• Primetime Adventures. Roleplaying games are about telling stories - why not make them about television shows instead?
• Polaris. Once upon a time, as far north as north can go, there lived the greatest people that this world will ever see. They are gone now, destroyed just as the world destroys all beautiful things.

• Kill Puppies for Satan: An Unfunny Roleplaying Game. "the system is minimal in the way that particularly irritates people who would rather be playing rolemaster or millenium's end. you have only six stats, for instance, and that's counting generously. one stat is how many people hate you"
• Dogs in the Vineyard. The Lord may be your shepard, but sometimes he can use a gnarly old Watchdog to help keep the wolves at bay.
• Primetime Adventures. Roleplaying games are about telling stories - why not make them about television shows instead?
• Polaris. Once upon a time, as far north as north can go, there lived the greatest people that this world will ever see. They are gone now, destroyed just as the world destroys all beautiful things.

The big, glossy, expensive games may not be doing so well. And if you're taking total revenue as a measure of health then maybe the paper&pencil gaming scene isn't doing so well. As the subject says, meh. A drop in Britney Spears sales does not indicate a crisis in music.

What TFA mostly failed to mention was the extraordinary progress in indie RPG design over the last few years. The indies may not be raking in money hand over fist, but that hasn't stopped them creating some very good games (Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard and Matt Wilson's Primetime Adventures, f'rinstance) and, more importantly, getting a solid theoretical handle on what RPGs are about and how they work. What Lajos Egri did for playwriting and Robert McKee did for screenwriting, these guys are doing for RPGs. I've been following the industry since the early 1980s, and the last few years have been a real eyeopener. No, the GM is not God. Yes, system does matter. No, throwing together a huge heap of rules and expecting fun to magically fall out is not going to cut it.

• Primetime Adventures, by Dog-Eared Designs. A good role-playing game should feel like you're coauthoring a good drama, right? So why not make the analogy explicit?
• Dogs in the Vineyard, by Lumpley Games. Maybe the first game that gives faith the treatment it deserves in a serious game context. (Also, the author is an old friend of mine. Buy three copies!)
• Polaris, by TAO Games: about a time long ago in the frozen north, when the people were dying at the end of the world. (Very eerie, neat play mecahnics

Surprised no one mentioned this so far, but there's one development that has grown in influence over the last few years, and that's the Forge Booth. In a nutshell, this is a Gencon booth run by regulars at The Forge, a website devoted to discussion of RPG theory and how to make games that are coherent, instead of a jumbled mishmash of things put in either because they were "cool" or because "that's how RPGs are supposed to be."

It is pointless to make more and more complex games, when computers can do a much better job of tracking complex rule systems than people can. Not to mention that no one wants to play "Physics: The Calculating". Simulating reality is therefore kind of pointless. Instead you have to focus on the non-wargamey parts of RPGs, i.e. the story.

The Forge people get this and design their games accordingly. They have a laser-sharp focus on their subject matter and often produce amazing game sessions.

Two Forge games that are universally critically hailed are Dogs In The Vineyard and My Life With Master.

Dogs is set in a mythical west, where the PCs are a bit like Templars with six-guns. The game addresses the question of "how far are you willing to go to have your vision of righteousness made manifest?"

Master, on the other hand, addresses the premise of "Can you survive through love?" It is set in an anonymous central European town, where all the PCs are minions of an evil Master, a la Dr. Frankenstein/Igor. They have to try and gradually work up the courage (via forming relationships with the townsfolk) to overthrow the Master. Of course we know that eventually the Master will be overthrown (just like we know this in the movie, or we know that in D&D the PCs will slay the dragon); the excitement is in how it happens and what happens to the Minions prior to, and after, this event.

Now of course these games will never achieve the commercial success of D&D, or even one of the 2nd- or 3rd-tier of popularity like Vampire or GURPS. But in 5-10 years (mark my words!) this approach to RPGs will have sneakily infiltrated the mainstream.